The two younger men answered some of my questions, sullenly at first, but afterwards with more friendliness, against which their pride struggled. But they had not much to say. They were tired. They had been taken by surprise. They would have time to learn English as prisoners of war. They had plenty of food and tobacco.
When the next batch of them arrived I was able to get into a closed truck, among the private soldiers. They were quite comfortable in there, and were more cheery than the officers in the other train. I was surprised by their cleanliness, by the good condition of their uniforms, and by their good health and spirits. The life of the trenches had not left its marks upon them, though mentally, perhaps, they had gone to the uttermost limit of endurance. Only one man fired up savagely when I said that they were lucky in being captured. "It is good to fight for the Fatherland," he said. The others made no secret of their satisfaction in being out of it all, and all of them described the attack on Neuve Chapelle as a hellish thing which had caught them by surprise and swept their ranks.
I went back to my billet in General Headquarters wishing that I had seen something of that affair which had netted all these men. It had been a "day out" for the British troops, and we had not yet heard of the blunders or the blood that had spoilt its success. It was hard to have seen nothing of it though so near the front. And then a promise of seeing something of the operations on the morrow came as a prospect for the next day. It would be good to see the real business again and to thrill once more to the awful music of the guns.
Along the road next day it was obvious that "things" were going to happen. As we passed through towns in our motor-cars there were signs of increased activity. Troops were being moved up. Groups of them in goatskin coats, so that English Tommies looked like their Viking ancestors, halted for a spell by the side of their stacked arms, waiting for orders. Long lines of motor-lorries, with supplies to feed the men and guns, narrowed the highway for traffic. Officers approached our cars at every halt, saluted our staff officer, and asked anxious questions: "How are things going? Is there any news?"
In the open country we could see the battle front, the low-lying marshlands with windmills waving their arms on the far horizon, the ridges and woods in which British and German batteries were concealed, and the lines of trenches in which our men lay very close to their enemy. We left the cars and, slithering in sticky mud, made our way up a hillock on which one of these innumerable windmills stood distinct. We were among the men who were in the actual fighting lines and who went into the trenches turn and turn about, so that it became the normal routine of their lives.
In the early days of the war these regiments had suffered heavy losses, so that there were new drafts in them now, but there were lads here who had fought at Mons and Charleroi and had seen their comrades fall in heaps round about Le Cateau. They told their tales, with old memories of terror, which had not made cowards of them. Their chief interest to-day was centred in a football match which was to take place about the same time as the "other business." It was not their day out in the firing line. We left them putting on their football boots and hurling chaff at each other in the dim light. Out of the way of the flying shells they forgot all about the horror of war for a little while.
Forcing our way through the brushwood on the slopes, we reached the crest of the hillock. Near by stood two generals and several staff officers—men whose names have been written many times in the Chief's dispatches and will be written for all time in the history of this war. They were at their post of observation, to watch the progress of an attack which was timed to begin shortly.
Presently two other figures came up the hillside. One of them arrested my attention. Who was that young officer, a mere boy, who came toiling up through the slime and mud, and who at the crest halted and gave a quick salute to the two generals? He turned, and I saw that it was Edward, Prince of Wales, and through the afternoon, when I glanced at him now and again as he studied his map and gazed across the fields, I thought of another Edward, Prince of Wales, who six centuries ago stood in another field of France. Out of the past came old ghosts of history, who once as English princes and knights and men-at-arms fought at St. Omer, and Ypres, Bailleul, and Béthune, and all that very ground which lay before me now…
More than an hour before the time at which the attack was to be concentrated upon the enemy's position—a line of trenches on a ridge crowned by a thin wood immediately opposite my observation point— our guns began to speak from many different places. It was a demonstration to puzzle the enemy as to the objective of our attack.
The flashes came like the flicking of heliographs signalling messages by a Morse code of death. After each flash came the thunderous report and a rushing noise as though great birds were in flight behind the veil of mist which lay on the hillsides. Puffs of woolly-white smoke showed where the shrapnel was bursting, and these were wisped away into the heavy clouds. Now and again one heard the high singing note of shells travelling towards us—the German answer to this demonstration—and one saw the puff balls resting on the hill-spur opposite our observation post.